Review submitted for coursework on 2/13/2018
Like other recent works on the Civil Rights Movement, Theoharis and Woodard’s edited volume reconsiders the often-unexamined parameters of gender, time, and place. If ever Michel Rolph-Trulliot’s critique of archival silences were to come to life, the media during this period would provide a solid case. Media focused on male leaders; their selective coverage not only complicated campaign efforts, but it also influenced historiographers to write women into a peripheral role, if at all. A similar dynamic occurred with time and place. By mere repetition of familiar narratives, a series of explanatory dichotomies surfaced: North and South; urban and rural; violent and peaceful, and so on. By upending simplistic binaries, this volume extends the timeline of the Civil Rights Movement to demonstrate that organized protest didn’t materialize out of thin air—nor did it dissipate as quickly and uniformly as popular accounts would have us believe. Likewise, disproportionate influence placed on civil rights as a southern issue ignored movements in both the North (and West), and contributed to a narrative arc from civil rights to black power to white resistance, leading to its ultimate demise. Instead, the case studies in Freedom North focus on specific instances that break apart common misunderstandings and lacunae in the scholarship.
The book opens with an excellent introduction to eleven articles, all of which question assumptions about our understanding of well-known and not-so-well-known campaigns in the Civil Rights Movement. Gender is addressed in several articles, but perhaps due to its multiple authors, compartmentalized framework, and space constraints, it does not receive equal weight. For example, Ula Taylor labors on the question of why women would want to join the Nation of Islam given its prescriptive and traditional gender roles. And while she takes pot shots at Eldridge Cleaver’s sexism, it does not explore the comparative dimensions of gender to any degree of significance. While comparing women in various movements isn’t the purpose of Taylor’s article, because it is juxtaposed against Dillard’s work on Black Christian nationalism, one wonders how women perceived their roles within Cleage’s church. Amiri Baraka addressed it best when he said: “To the extent that women seized full political participation, the Black Power movement flourished. However, to the extent that some Black Power advocates stymied the dynamics of women’s liberation, they damned the prospects for black liberation.”[1]
One of the better examples of how the times (and places) of the standard Civil Rights Movement is questioned is Robert O. Self’s article on movements in Oakland preceding the Black Panther Party. In demonstrating workplace and living segregation and the limitations of workers’ attempts to extend racial liberalism to the North, Self invokes organizations such as Rumford’s Easty Bay Democratic Club, which promoted “middle-class integration, racial uplift, and a race-blind society achieved through legislation.”[2] Key to Self’s argument is the struggle for economic rights over civil rights in the postwar years.[3]
Perhaps no other article challenges prevailing dichotomies in the Civil Rights Movement than Theoharis’s discussion of the desegregation of Boston public schools. It clearly shows how busing black students to attend schools in white areas was never the issue at hand. Instead, the movement was largely comprised of mothers who were interested in educational justice. Organizing and paying for busing students within cities to white schools, and even busing students to suburban areas, had more to do with trying to shame the school board into allowing black taxpayers to get their money’s worth. This article is revelatory in documenting how disproportionate media attention to white resistance as a “working-class” movement “ignores its middle-class base and minimizes the benefits whites accrued from segregation.”[4] This dynamic fed the myth that resistance had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the rights of neighborly people to self-determination and schooling. In revealing that, for example, white children living next door to black children would bus attend different schools, Theoharis thoroughly contests this myth.
On the whole, the U.S. educational system tends to promote hero worship of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in grade school and two-week units in high school that box in the movement into sound bites—its larger significance and relevance to the present tends to be lost. If students opt in to history courses in college, they are likely to be survey courses that offer even less time to the Civil Rights Movement. In my view, it is key to develop ways to adapt research findings like these to the public education system at least at the secondary level as quickly as possible. Otherwise, unless students take specialty courses or research on their own, they are likely to perpetuate misunderstandings about the Civil Rights Movement that filter into their interpretation of contemporary protest movements and the protestors. Otherwise, even the introduction of Freedom North with select articles would be worthy material for any undergraduate course covering these themes or periods.
[1] 308.
[2] 106.
[3] 95.
[4] 141.